Nero MediaHome 4.5.8

Easily stream music, videos, photos and TV across your network

By Mike Williams | May 18, 2010

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Your digital media collection is too important to be tied to your PC - but fortunately Nero MediaHome can set it free. This UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) media server makes it straightforward to share audio, picture and video files, even live TV, with any other compatible players on the network: a UPnP-compliant television, XBox 360, PS3, your laptop, other networked PCs, and more.

Working with compatible devices is surprisingly easy. Nero MediaHome will automatically discover any available players that are connected to your network, and then you're able to use a player tool to decide which video, audio or other file you'd like to stream. The program will automatically take care of the low-level transcoding details for you, although if this doesn't quite work - you're using a wireless network and it's not fast enough, say - you can apply some manual tweaks to improve performance.

If you have a compatible TV tuner card - and MediaHome supports products from Pinnacle, Hauppauge, Terratec, Avermedia and others - then it's also possible to stream live television. This takes a little more work, as you must define all the channels you'd like to be available, but you only need to do this once, and a wizard walks you through each step of the process.

There's also support for streaming internet radio, podcasts, even WebTV over your network. And whatever media you're viewing, there's no need to worry about file formats or other complexities. MediaHome will take care of all that, while you just sit back and enjoy the show.

Verdict

A capable media server. Note that it doesn't yet support Windows 7, though